Hello Community,
I'm trying to create a file having US Census data from data.census.gov website. After going through the website, I have realized that there are separate tables for the demographic data that I'm looking for (The data to be retrieved is at a zip code level), such as, population, land area, number of houses, owned or rented property, mean income, etc. One way is to download separate files for each of these demographic variables, do a vlookup on the zip code and combine them, however, I'm trying to find a solution (if possible), to be able to pull to pull them together in a single file or from a single table. Could someone please let me know if such a solution exists?
Thank you!
Linking based on GeoID works but can be cumbersome. There are ways to write code to download the summary files and process them using a statistical package, or to use open-source tools to write code using…
Some other websites provide Census & ACS data in ways that make it easy to combine many tables in one file. The site I manage, IPUMS NHGIS, allows you to select any number of tables from a single dataset…
Linking based on GeoID works but can be cumbersome. There are ways to write code to download the summary files and process them using a statistical package, or to use open-source tools to write code using the API.
Summary files option: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/library/handbooks/summary-file.html
Open source options: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/statistical-software.html
Some other websites provide Census & ACS data in ways that make it easy to combine many tables in one file. The site I manage, IPUMS NHGIS, allows you to select any number of tables from a single dataset and download them in one file for all ZCTAs in the U.S.If you're looking for the latest 2021 5-year ACS, we're currently on track to release that tomorrow (Dec. 13) on NHGIS.
To follow up on Beth's posting, (I don't think that this solution will be very satisfying but ) I use R and the API to combine across tables and geos. I wrote an R function(s) to do weighted sums, products and ratios across geos and table categories (and across tables) that use both the Estimate and Margin of Error.(based on the formulas in the handbook chapter 8 (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/acs/acs_general_handbook_2020.pdf) However I write a custom R program each time I do this. There is "tidycensus" which is an R package that can download census data so you can do various types of "combining.". R is opensource and free. It works on windows, macs and linux boxes. You need to learn R which is not difficult if you have programming experience. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidycensus/index.html All this is a pretty "heavy lift" but if you are doing a lot of work using the ACS this is the way to go.
Dave